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Inhabiting the Christian Narrative: An Example of the Relationship Between Religion and the Moral Life

John R. Stumme

01/01/2003

The following paper was presented at an International
Symposium on "Religions, Morality and Social Concerns" at Fudan
University, Shanghai, China in April 2003.

The university's newly established Institute of Religious Studies
brought together Christians (Protestant and Catholic), Jews,
Muslims, Buddhists, Marxists and others from China, other Asian
countries, Europe and the United States. According to the
university's president, this was the first symposium at the
university dealing with religion since Mao's revolution in
1949. The papers varied in their approaches and content, and
discussion was open and respectful. I chose to present a
Christian understanding of the relationship of faith and the moral
life from the "inside."

Approaching the Topic
[1] The invitation to explore "the relationship between religion(s)
and the development of moral consciousness or social awareness"
implies a distinction between religion and morality as well as a
connection between them. It assumes that religious beliefs and
practices do, or least may have, an influence on moral awareness
and behavior. The invitation assumes that this influence is worth
exploring, although it does not say why it is worthwhile.

[2] I agree with these assumptions. Within the religious
tradition in which I stand, Christians do distinguish between
believers' relation to God and their relation to others, and at the
same time they believe that their relation to God has significance
for all their relationships. Christians may be described as people
who place their trust in the triune God revealed in Jesus Christ.
They distort their beliefs and practices when they divorce their
faith in God from love of neighbor as well as when they reduce
their faith to morality. Jesus' double commandment speaks both of
the distinction and connection of faith and morality: "You shall
love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul,
and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your
neighbor as yourself" (Luke 10:27).

[3] I also agree that the influence of religion on the moral
life is worth exploring, and I believe that for two reasons: One
reason is for the sake of the faithfulness, strength and renewal of
the religious tradition itself. Christians-and something similar
can certainly be said of participants in other religious
traditions-must continually attend to what it means to live as
faithful disciples of Jesus Christ in today's world; they need to
ask again and again what it means, in the words of St. Paul, "to
lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called"
(Ephesians 4:1). When Christians explore the relation of faith and
life with this intent, they are involved in the critical and
constructive task of theological ethics. While this task belongs
principally to adherents of the Christian faith-who, one hopes, are
listening to and learning from others-its importance extends beyond
the Christian church. When, for example, small bands of persons in
the United States, claiming to be Christian, organize to spread
hatred of and violence toward African Americans, Jews, Muslims and
others, Christians are the ones who have the responsibility to say
that such attitudes and behavior have no place in the lives of
followers of Jesus Christ. Christians must so speak to guard the
integrity of their faith, to protect the targets of hate, and to
contribute to the common good.

[4] My own self-understanding is tied up with the reason I have
just described. I am a Christian theologian and ethicist, rooted in
the Lutheran tradition, called to assist the church in my context
in the critical and constructive task of thinking and talking about
the relation of faith and life. Since one necessarily speaks out of
one's own experience and social location, a word about myself seems
appropriate. As Director for Studies in the Division for Church in
Society of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, I struggle
daily with how our church and its members should move from what we
confess about God to our social responsibility. Our church states
in its constitution that one of its purposes is to "serve in
response to God's love to meet human needs, caring for the sick and
the aged, advocating dignity and justice for all people, working
for peace and reconciliation among the nations, and standing with
the poor and powerless and committing itself to their
needs."1 I
contribute to this purpose by preparing or overseeing the
development of studies that are meant to educate members on their
social responsibility and to address difficult social issues. I
also work with task forces to develop documents on social issues
that are discussed throughout the church and adopted as official
policy of our church.2 This reference to my own work
makes evident that my reflections come out of particular
circumstances, tied up with the history of the Lutheran church, the
society and culture of the United States, and the global events of
this time in history.

[5] The second reason why it is worthwhile to explore the
relationship of religion and moral consciousness, a reason I
surmise motivates this conference, is the continuing vitality of
religions to shape peoples' moral awareness and behavior. Religions
do indeed make a difference in how people live and act. Billions of
people in our global society view their moral lives as rooted in
religion. For some, this fact comes as a surprise and puzzlement. A
powerful narrative that comes out of the Western Enlightenment has
in various ways told the story for more than two centuries that
religion is a relic of a pre-modern world, based in ignorance and
superstition. Religion, the story tells us, will disappear in the
enlightened modern world where reason, science, technology,
education and justice reign. For many today this narrative has
collapsed and lost its plausibility in the face of the persistence
of religion.

[6] One example of a scholar who has changed his mind about the
future of religion is the American sociologist of religion, Peter
L. Berger, who for many years promoted "secularization theory."
According to this theory, "modernization necessarily leads to a
decline in religion, both in society and in the minds of
individuals." Now, recently in a book aptly titled The
Desecularization of the World, Berger argues that
secularization theory "is essentially mistaken"; modernization "has
also provoked powerful movements of
counter-secularization."3 Like it or not, religion is
likely to be impacting peoples' moral consciousness and social
world for some time to come. Exploring the nature of this impact is
vital for the future of individuals, societies and our shared
earth.

[7] Our topic is worthwhile, yet to seek to say something
coherent about it is a daunting task. In our pluralistic, rapidly
changing, global world, we encounter an amazing diversity of
religions as well as major differences within the same religious
tradition. Religions, we see, are not static but dynamic, so that
at best, it seems, we may only capture a snapshot of them that
gives us a partial, perhaps blurry, picture of the past but does
not tell us much about the present or the future. Clearly,
religions both influence and are influenced by their social world,
and it is difficult to determine what influence is decisive. When
we ask about the relationship of religion to moral consciousness
and behavior, the diversity is overwhelming. Adherents of the same
religion may, for example, appeal to their religion to sanction
holy wars or crusades or to require non-violence. The same religion
in different circumstances may function to support the status
quo or to resist it. Empirical and conceptual generalizations
about religion can often be countered by examples that do not fit
the generalization.

[8] In turning to the scholarly study of religion, one sees
again the complexity of our topic. Scholars employ many
methodological approaches, viewing religion through historical,
sociological, anthropological, psychological, cultural, linguistic,
phenomenological and even biological lens. All of these approaches
may provide valuable insights into religion, and none of them is
without its limitations, its methodological debates and its
discarded theories. Scholars aim to understand and explain
religion, some to expand it away, but interpretations differ and
often clash. When one presses the questions, "What is religion?"
or, "What is moral consciousness?" it becomes clear that there are
no agreed-upon definitions. Since scholars, too, stand in some
relation to the religious beliefs and practices they study, their
perspectives and interpretations need to be scrutinized not only
for the adequacy of their descriptions but also for the implicit or
explicit normative stance and judgments they make.

[9] In the face of the vastness and complexity of our general
topic, what, I asked myself, can I who am not a scholar of
religions but a scholar within one religion contribute to this
conference? The answer I arrived at is that perhaps I can
illustrate how one religious tradition understands itself to be
influencing "the development of moral consciousness or social
awareness" (a phrase that I summarize with "the moral life," which
includes both personal and social life, both consciousness and
behavior). Instead of speaking from the vantage point of an outside
observer, I approach the topic from the perspective of a person
inside the Christian community, as one who participates in that
community, who is formed by its practices and teachings and who
accepts its beliefs as true and normative. My aim is not to
convince others of these beliefs but to describe their meaning for
the moral life and thereby to offer an example or a case study for
our consideration. In various ways I seek to address the question:
What shape and content does the Christian narrative give to
believers' moral life? Even with this limitation, my approach opens
up an immense area of exploration.

Making the Connection through "Narrative"
[10] There are various reasons why the concept of
"narrative" or "story" is especially appropriate for considering
the relation of Christian faith to the moral life. Humans are
storytellers and story dwellers. Humans live self-consciously in a
present that has come from somewhere and leads somewhere. Stories
are bound up with this human awareness of time, with living in the
present, remembering the past and anticipating the future. In
relating what has happened in the past and what will or may happen
in the future, stories help humans make sense of present acts and
events. Stories allow humans to see the contingent fragments of
their finite lives within larger, meaningful wholes. Stories, which
tell of particular people in particular times and places, grab
people in ways that more prepositional or abstract discourse often
does not. They captivate people in their pre-reflective
consciousness, and they give rise to new reflection, thoughts and
insights. Stories speak to humans as whole persons, evoking their
emotions, intellect and will.

[11] Human persons live within many narratives. We may live
within a family story, an ethnic story, a gender story, a
stage-in-life story, a national story, an education story, a work
story, a friend story, a place story, a time story (we are "modern"
or "post-modern" people) and a religious or a comprehensive secular
story. Our stories tell us who we are, offer structure and meaning
to our lives, link us with others, provide roles we are to carry
out, account for institutional structures, identify what we should
do and not do and give examples of what is good and evil. Our own
personal story is a unique and complex composition of the shared
stories of the groups or communities to which we belong. To know a
person or a community is to know that person or community's story.
To know the Christian community is to know its narrative.

[12] The concept of narrative has received considerable
attention in certain currents of philosophical ethics and Christian
theology in the United States. This attention is part of what Gene
Outka, a Christian ethicist at Yale University in the United
States, has called "The Particularist Turn in Philosophical and
Theological Ethics." Outka identifies a movement that "turns away
from formalist and universalist ethical theories and toward some
particular historical-ethical community." Universalist ethical
theories claim that basic moral beliefs are known through reason
alone, are available across cultures and historical periods, are
entirely justifiable without recourse to particular beliefs and
practices that distinguish communities, and apply to all humans.
Particularist ethical theories challenge these claims and insist
that moral beliefs are historically and contextually situated.
Human thinking and living are tradition-dependent and culturally
conditioned, these theories argue; we should therefore view our
traditions borne by communities "not as mere milieus but as
repositories, not accidental but essential to the moral knowledge
on whose basis we ought to live our lives." Such an understanding
means that "the most fitting way to view our individual human lives
is to narrate our histories."4

[13] A leading representative in moral philosophy of this
particularist turn is Alasdair MacIntyre. In his ground-breaking
book After Virtue, MacIntyre writes: "I can only answer
the question, 'What am I to do?' if I can answer the prior
question, 'Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?'" The
moral agent exists in a narrative context, the bearer of "a
particular social identity. . . . I inherit from the past of my
family, my city, my tribe, my nation, a variety of debts,
inheritances, rightful expectations and obligations. These
constitute the given of my life, my moral starting
point."5 This
understanding of the moral agent differs from those views that
"regard the self as being detached from the entanglements of
society, history, and even its own past," as "serene and
autonomous, float[ing] freely in the rarefied atmosphere of
Reason."6
MacIntyre's polemic is directed against modern individualism in
which "I am what I myself choose to be." Instead, he argues, the
moral agent is tradition dependent, and traditions are born by
communities. His focus on narrative coheres with his understanding
of the importance of tradition, community, character, virtues and
vision for moral philosophy. In a famous sentence, MacIntyre
writes, "A living tradition then is an historically extended,
socially embodied argument, and an argument precisely in part about
the goods which constitute that tradition."7 The Christian narrative
belongs to such a living tradition.

[14] George A. Lindbeck at Yale University illustrates the
particularist turn in Christian theology and provides another
example of the importance of narrative in current thinking in the
United States. In what he calls a "pre-theological inquiry,"
Lindbeck compares two models for understanding religion and
experience and evaluates them for their empirical and conceptual
adequacy. In one model religions are products of those deep
experiences we call religious, and in the other model the converse
is true: religions are producers of experience. In the
"experiential-expressive" model, "different religions are diverse
expressions or objectifications of a common core experience" that
"is present in all human beings." Lindbeck rejects this model in
favor of a "cultural-linguistic" model. Religions, he contends, are
like languages or cultures that make possible the experiencing of
inner attitudes and the formulation of beliefs. "Like a culture or
language, [religion] is a communal phenomenon that shapes the
subjectives of individuals rather than being primarily a
manifestation of those subjectivities." He understands religions to
be "comprehensive interpretative schemes, usually embodied in myths
or narratives and heavily ritualized, which structure human
experience and understanding of the self and world." Their cosmic
stories identify and describe "what is taken to be 'more important
than everything else in the universe,' and organize all of life,
including both behavior and beliefs, in relation to
this."8

[15] These three scholars argue in different ways for connecting
narrative, Christian faith and morality. I share with Outka and
MacIntyre the view that the moral life belongs in a narrative
context, and with Lindbeck, the understanding that religions with
their cosmic stories are shapers and produces of experience. There
is one further reason, a decisive one, for using the concept of
narrative to make the link between faith and moral life. The
Christian God has a story. This God's identity is known through
what he does. To answer, "Who is God?" Christians tell the story of
what God has done, is doing and will do in relation to humankind
and creation. They identify divine agency in human affairs with
active verbs: God creates, speaks, judges, preserves, frees, calls,
demands, gives, blesses, becomes human, forgives, comforts,
promises, fulfills, and so forth. To speak of such a God one must
tell that story.

Dwelling within the Christian Narrative
[16] The Christian narrative is the biblical narrative. Christians
tell their story by reading and interpreting the Bible, a book of
books with numerous stories of different genre. They do so in the
church, the community of believers, who view the Bible as
Scripture, turning to it with the expectation of hearing the living
Word of God. The central character in the narrative is a God
involved in human history. The story line is this God's steadfast
and unrelenting love for humanity and all creation. The narrative
begins with God creating heaven and earth; portrays human rebellion
and sin; tells of God electing the people of Israel to be blessing
to all, freeing them from slavery and making a covenant with them;
relates God's gift and promise of salvation from sin and death
through the life, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus the
Messiah, God's only Son; recounts the sending of the Holy Spirit
and the creation of the church as the bearer of the story and its
promise; and looks forward to the end of all in God's eternal
reign.

[17] Any account of the biblical or Christian narrative is
partial and selective; it also is normative, that is, it
necessarily makes claims about what does and does not belong to the
narrative. The history of Christian theology can be told as a
continuing conversation about what constitutes the Christian
narrative and what is important and good in that narrative. In
interpreting the Christian narrative, I am making disputed
judgments in this often-testy theological conversation. There are
many ways to speak of the narrative; mine is done with a Lutheran
accent, an accent that is usually associated with the center of the
Western Christian tradition.

[18] Certainly Christians are shaped by other narratives and
influenced by non-theological factors. Certainly Christians often
act in ways that betray, contradict, and embody the narrative
imperfectly, realities of which the narrative itself takes account.
Yet it is my contention that the Christian narrative is often an
independent, non-reducible factor in the lives of many believers.
The metaphor of "inhabiting" or "dwelling within" the Christian
narrative is meant to suggest that the narrative may and often does
have a strong influence on believers' moral life. To inhabit the
narrative means to live it from the inside; it is to know its
language, its images, its individual stories, its practices, its
people; it is to be at home in the familiar surroundings that it
creates. To inhabit the narrative is to trust in the God whose
story it tells, to make the narrative one's own, to view the world
and self in its terms and to respond to its calling to a new way of
life. The analytic distinctions we modern people try to make
between "religious acts" and "moral acts" or between "what is" and
"what ought to be" are an imposition on the narrative's integral,
holistic portrayal of living before God. Worshiping God and caring
for neighbor are intertwined in the narrative. Those who are caught
up in it believe that God's Holy Spirit works through the narrative
to free and empower them to love and do justice to others.

[19] If this approach has any validity, it means that the
Christian narrative's influence on believers' moral formation needs
to be seen comprehensively, as something that permeates the whole
of their moral life. It cannot, for example, be limited to
providing a moral code, giving examples of good behavior, or
listing how Christians stand on various moral issues. In
considering the manner in which the narrative influences persons,
let me suggest that it occurs in three interrelated dimensions or
arenas of the moral life. I will identity the dimension and
illustrate the narrative's influence in each dimension.

[20] First, the Christian narrative defines reality. It provides
a lens through which Christians see, understand and interpret the
world, persons, institutions and events. The concern here is with
how persons perceive situations and determine what is going on and
what is at stake. The Christian narrative, I claim, influences how
persons envision, comprehend, discern, and imagine the world.

[21] To illustrate this dimension I refer to the narrative's
theme that tells of a God who is the creator and preserver of all
that exists. The theme presents a lens on reality that has
full-reaching moral implications. It makes a fundamental
distinction between God and all the rest of reality. God is God
because he calls all into existence out of nothing, and humans
along with the entire universe are creatures because their
existence comes from and continuously depends on God. Humans and
humanity are finite not infinite, created not the creator, who are
not alone in the Universe but live in the presence of the Other who
addresses them and acts upon, through, in and for them. Humans are
a living unity of body and spirit, not eternal souls imprisoned in
evil bodies. In the view of believers, therefore, the world is a
good and trustworthy created order, the non-human world has both
intrinsic and instrumental value, human life is God's gift to be
received, treasured and protected, and all persons share a common
humanity. That all, male and female, are created in "the image of
God" (Genesis 1:27) points to the divinely-bestowed unity, dignity
and equality of all people before God, to whom God gives mandates
to ensure future generations and to represent God's rule ("have
dominion") over other living things (Genesis 1:27-28).

[22] Second, the Christian narrative forms character. Character
refers to the "sort of person" one is, the persistence of a
person's identity that makes others expect consistency in her moral
judgments and actions.9 The concern here is with the
moral agent or moral self. The Christian narrative, I claim,
influences persons' character and their moral traits, such as their
virtues (or gifts of the Spirit), attitudes, disposition,
loyalties, "senses of life," and habits.

[23] To illustrate this dimension with the creation theme, one
might say: Trusting that one is a creature of a loving God evokes
in the moral self a sense of worth and dignity that, among other
things, defies attempts to transform the person into a mere
extension of another.10 It calls forth distinctive
character traits in the moral agent, such as an abiding sense of
gratitude to God for the goodness and wonder of life and creation,
a sense of direction to life bound up with God's purpose for
creation, a sense of obligation to act in accord with the creator's
will, and a sense of modesty fitting for a creature. Being a
creature evokes attitudes of thanksgiving, resolve, responsibility
and humility.

[24] Third, the Christian narrative guides action. It sets forth
obligations to fulfill, goods to protect and seek, norms to govern
acts and standards by which to make moral judgments. The concern
here is with actions and the criteria by which they are to be
evaluated as good or evil, right or wrong. The Christian narrative,
I claim, influences persons' moral life by supplying direction for
what they should and should not do.

[25] Using the creation theme to illustrate this dimension of
the moral life, one may summarize by saying that human creatures
are under obligation to act in accordance with the creator's intent
for human community and for the rest of creation. In the flow of
the narrative, since all people are God's creatures, all people
should be treated in accordance with their God-given worth and
dignity. The Ten Commandments with their prohibitions of idolatry,
murder, lying, stealing and adultery are meant to protect the
precious life God has given. The Golden Rule presupposes that all
are God's creatures: Act toward all others as you want others to
act toward you. Christians draw upon the creation theme when they
consider humans' relation with their environment, and when they
address human oppression, poverty, peace and war, human diversity,
the relationship of men and women, sexuality, marriage, religious
freedom, health, the death penalty, abortion, euthanasia, cloning
and a host of other issues where claims about who the human person
is are crucial.

[26] Not all people inhabit the Christian narrative but all
people are, according to the narrative, God's creatures. On the one
hand, this implies that Christians are obligated to treat all
persons in accordance with their God-given dignity; all, including
enemies, are to be loved. On the other hand, the creation theme
implies that at least traces of God's intention for human life may
be found among all who are created in God's image, perhaps with a
greater clarity than in the church. Christians should rejoice when
they find that persons who inhabit other narratives have a strong
sense of right and wrong, follow some general rule similar to the
Golden Rule and prohibit behavior similar to that forbidden in the
second table of the Ten Commandments. It is consistent with the
Christian narrative to think that while comprehensive narratives,
whether religious or secular, are very different, they also may
contain moral norms and obligations that overlap among them,
creating possibilities for living together.

[27] Other themes within the Christian narrative strengthen what
the creation theme brings to moral formation or contribute new
features to Christians' moral life. The teachings, example and
suffering of Jesus Christ, for example, reinforce the worth of
every person and beckon Christians to respond in mercy and justice
to all people who are marginalized, ill, impoverished or otherwise
in need. Abstracting themes from the narrative or dimensions of the
moral life from the lived experience of those dwelling within the
narrative hardly does justice to the fluid, dynamic ways that
Christian faith may impact believers emotions, thoughts and will.
It may, however, have made clearer that the Christian narrative
does influence moral life.

Characterizing Christians' Moral Life
[28] In this concluding section, I attempt the risky task of
sketching key characteristics of the moral life as understood by
those who inhabit the Christian narrative. In light of what I have
said this far, I seek to describe in theological terms the shape
and content the narrative gives to the moral life. Consider it as
one model of how Christians perceive their moral life.

[29] 1. The moral life is one of relationship,
with God, with the non-human creation and with other humans. God
created humans so that they may live in communion with
him-worshiping, honoring and glorifying God-care for the earth in
their use of it and live in peace with all others. Living in right
relationship in the created world depends ultimately on being in
right relationship with God.

[30] 2. Humans, however, find themselves in the
midst of broken relationships. The moral life is lived with an
awareness of something deeply wrong in human affairs; sin names
what distorts the goodness of creation and contradicts the
creator's intent. All humans "are bound together in sin. Sin, the
rupture in our relation with God, profoundly disrupts creation.
Centeredness in self, rather than in God, destroys the bonds of
human community. In bondage to sin, we fall captive to fear. Sin
entangles our social structures. The Bible describes the power of
sin: ingratitude, deceit, distrust, hatred, greed, envy, arrogance,
sloth, corruption, debauchery, aggression, cruelty, oppression, and
injustice."11
Sin points to the human condition and to personal and social acts
arising from this condition. In sin, humans elevate a created good
to the place of God, finding in power, pleasure, money, nation, or
cause their ultimate loyalty and source of meaning, and using God
and others as means to achieve their end. God's good and just
demands for right relationships come as a threat that judges and
condemns humans entrapped in sin.

[31] 3. The moral life of Christians is a
joyful response to God's saving act in Jesus Christ. Through the
Holy Spirit's gift of faith, God frees believers from the bondage
of sin, death and divine judgment, forgives them their sin, and
sets them in right relationship with God. Faith in Jesus Christ
creates communion with God and frees believers to love their
neighbor. This new way of life marks a radical break, a conversion,
a turning from self to God, a dying with Christ to the old and
rising to "walk in newness of life" (Romans 6: 3-4); it means being
"a new creation" (2 Corinthians 5:17). God's gracious act in Jesus
Christ motivates and energizes Christians' moral life. It provides
reasons of the heart and mind to answer the question, "Why be
moral?" The cross of the Son of God is the key for seeing the whole
of the biblical narrative as God's love story with creation. As St.
Paul writes, "God proves his love for us in that while we were
still sinners Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8). God's prior
activity propels the moral life. "We love because [God] first loved
us" (1 John 4:19). Human action therefore is not a means to achieve
salvation, to establish a right relationship with God, or to
justify one's existence. Persons are righteous before God through
faith in Jesus Christ, not by doing good works. Salvation is the
presupposition for, not the consequence of, doing what is good and
right. Human action is thus freed to focus on the welfare of
others.

[32] 4. The moral life is communal, that is,
believers are incorporated in baptism into the church, the assembly
of believers gathered together by the Holy Spirit through the
gospel, the good news about Jesus Christ. The biblical narrative
becomes their own. The Holy Spirit nurtures and sustains the moral
life through various practices of the church: gathering in worship,
preaching, baptism, Holy Communion, music, singing, prayer,
services of healing, instruction in the faith, study of scripture,
giving to persons in need, visiting the sick and mutual consolation
and conversation among the faithful. The church's calendar (Advent,
Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Good Friday, Easter, Pentecost and
Trinity) tells God's story and structures the community's life. Its
liturgy or worship involves such public, communal practices as
confessing sin, praising God, hearing God's word, confessing the
church's faith, receiving the body and blood of Christ, praying the
Lord's Prayer, interceding before God for those who suffer and are
in need, offering one's self and goods and greeting one another
with the blessing, "The peace of the Lord be with you." Through
these practices, the Holy Spirit works to awaken and increase
faith, love and hope and to unite believers in all times and
places.

[33] 5. The moral life is an ongoing struggle.
Believers live in the contested area between two ages, the old age
where sin still reigns and the new one where Christ reigns. As
sinners they belong to the old age; as saints-righteous or holy
before God on account of Christ-they belong to the new. They are
paradoxically both sinner and saint at the same time. They are
forgiven sinners, yet sinners nonetheless. They know the continuing
power of sin in their own attitudes, acts and involvement in
institutions entangled in sin. This recognition fosters humility,
self-criticism and a sense of solidarity with all other sinners and
leaves no room for self-righteousness or moral triumphalism. Their
moral life then is not a steady progress to perfection but a
journey of daily repentance and forgiveness, a continuous return to
their baptism to be reclaimed and renewed by God's mercy. In
remembering that they belong to Christ in their baptism, they are
given hope: They are sinners who are forgiven and changed through
faith in God's merciful forgiveness and the Holy Spirit's
transforming power, whose fruits are "love, joy, peace, patience,
kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness [and] self-control"
(Galatians 5:22).

[34] 6. Christians live out their faith in
ordinary life.12 Their divine calling is to
serve God and others amid the relationships, stories, institutions
and responsibilities of their family, work, church, culture and
government. They do not withdraw from society into their own
enclave but participate critically in the human affairs of this
present age. Their participation stems from believing that God
works through human actors, institutions and events to order,
preserve and bless human life in society; their critical attitude
stems from awareness that sin also is at work to corrupt, violate
and oppress. Knowing that social institutions and processes combine
life-giving and life-destroying dynamics in complex mixtures and in
varying degrees, they are positioned to say both "yes" and "no" to
what is happening. They seek to unite realism and hope, wisdom and
courage, in their participation in society.13

[35] 7. The moral life includes responsibility
both for the church and for the political community in which the
church exists. God creates the church through the gospel to be its
bearer in service to the new age of God's reign. God institutes
government to serve this present age through consent, law and its
enforcement in order to resist evil, provide for the welfare of its
citizens and serve the common good (cf. Romans 13:1-7). Since God
authorizes both for distinctive purposes and gives them different
means to carry out these purposes, neither has authority to
dominate or control the other. Believers have responsibility to
ensure that both fulfill their God-given purposes with the means
God intends without overstepping their bounds. As citizens who are
Christians, they affirm and support the proper functions of
government when it acts justly, and they voice their criticism when
it does not. They remind government that it is God's servant not
God, that its authority is limited to the concerns of this age and
that it has no saving gospel. When government intervenes in the
church's service to God's new age, it has gone beyond its
authority; then, with Peter and the apostles, believers must say:
"We must obey God rather than men" (Acts 5:29). Believers expect
the church to be faithful to its calling, to obey just laws
appropriate for civic organizations, to cooperate where possible
with government in areas of mutual endeavor, and to advocate before
political authority with and for those who are without voice and
power. They resist their church when it uses government's coercive
power to advance its mission, when it subordinates its loyalty to
Christ to a political cause or government, or when it uses its
faith as a means to gain power. Then believers must say, "Jesus
alone is Lord of the church, who rules through the word of the
gospel not through the sword."

[36] 8. The moral life is lived in history at
the foot of the cross in the hope of the resurrection and the
coming in fullness of God's reign. Believers stand under the
judgment of the cross of Christ, where they also find God's
forgiveness and comfort. Shaped by the example of their Lord who
suffers for all in a suffering world, they are called to follow the
Crucified One by expending themselves for others, aware that their
discipleship may mean suffering and even death. The cross of a
suffering God is not defeat but victory, overcoming sin and death
and promising the resurrection from the dead and the fulfillment of
all in God's eternal reign. The time between the cross and the
final resurrection is a time of "now . . . not yet," a time when
salvation has come but yet is still to be fully revealed. During
this time before the End, God has not abandoned human history but
preserves, cares for and directs it, often in hidden, inscrutable
ways. Accordingly, believers approach historical events with an
attitude that is neither defeatist nor naively optimistic, but
sober and yet hopeful. They are not defeated by the existence of
historical evil, tragedy and the failure of utopian dreams; they
value provisional arrangements that provide for relative peace and
justice; they recognize that situations can become so unbearable
that they require radical change; and they join with others to
pursue historical possibilities that hold hope for a more just and
peaceful future. They do not find the meaning of history in
inevitable progress, the superiority of a race or the power of a
nation, but in God's reign promised in a Crucified and Risen
Lord.

[37] 9. The moral life involves discerning
God's will and intent. Certain things in the moral life of
believers are fairly clear: Deliberate deception of others for
personal gain, for example, is wrong. At times, the church is
called upon to speak prophetically: "Thus saith the Lord." But
often when asking what should one do in relation to this or that
issue, believers are perplexed, overwhelmed by its complexity or
torn between conflicting duties and goods. Believers with their
diverse experiences and social responsibilities may differ on what
should be done. In such situations, those who are shaped by the
biblical narrative need to talk together about what they, as
individuals and a community, should do. When they do so, the church
becomes a "community of moral deliberation."14 United together in faith as
forgiven sinners even when their moral judgments on particular
issues may differ, they are invited to converse and prayerfully
discern God's will. The conversation is many-sided: They interpret
the biblical narrative and ask for its meaning for the issue at
hand; they use their God-given reason to understand the issue,
drawing on the knowledge of experts and the experience of people
affected by the issue; they inquire how love, the Ten Commandments
and other biblical and contemporary norms apply to the situation;
they consider the options and their consequences and use their
imagination to seek alternatives. Through this deliberation
Christians' stance on an issue may change or may confirm what has
been received. Whether or not they reach agreement on the issue,
they are better equipped through this process of deliberation to
discern and decide what to do and to live out their calling in
daily life in responsible freedom. Moral discernment is an ongoing
part of the church's life.

[38] The moral life has a narrative context. If that is the
case, then one needs to be acquainted with the narrative in which
the moral life is enmeshed. I have sought to describe what it means
for persons' moral life to inhabit one narrative, the Christian
narrative. I have done so with the hope of providing for our
conversation an example of how, from my perspective, one religious
tradition understands its influence on the development of moral
consciousness and social awareness. If it has illuminated this
relationship at all, it should provoke new questions and insights
not addressed in this lengthy but partial description.

End Notes

1 The constitution of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in
America, ELCA 4.02.c.

2 Among the topics that the Evangelical Lutheran Church in
America has addressed in official documents since its beginning in
1988 are: environment, peace, economic life, race and ethnic
diversity, abortion, the death penalty, AIDS, the
Israeli/Palestinian conflict, homelessness, community violence,
end-of-life decisions, sexuality, immigration, suicide prevention
and commercial sexual exploitation. These social statements and
messages can be found online at elca.org/dcs/studies. The
Department for Studies has prepared studies on topics such as
Lutheran ethics, moral deliberation, gambling, education, genetics
and cloning. These studies also are online at the above
address.

8 George A. Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and
Theology in a Post Liberal Age (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1984),
31, 33, 32-33.

9 James M. Gustafson, "Education for Moral
Responsibility," Theology and Christian Ethics (Philadelphia:
Pilgrim, 1974), 64. In his many writings Gustafson has made
important contributions in sorting out different dimensions of the
moral experience and has influenced what I have written.

10 Eugene D. Genovese, who was then a Marxist historian,
made an extensive study of slavery in the United States and
concluded that it was the slaves' religion that inspired them to
resist slavery. While their masters introduced Christianity to
their slaves to inculcate obedience, the slaves found something
different in it. "If [Christianity] calls for political submission
to the powers that be, it also calls for militant defense of the
freedom of the spirit and the autonomy of the personality. But the
master-slave relationship rests, psychologically as well as
ideologically, on the transformation of the will of the slave into
an extension of the will of the master. Thus, no matter how
obedient-how Uncle Tomish-Christianity made a slave, it also drove
deep into his soul an awareness of the moral limits of submission,
for it placed a master above his own master and thereby dissolved
the moral and ideological ground on which the very principle of
absolute human lordship must rest." Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World
Slaves Made (New York: Random House, 1974), 165.

12 The philosopher Charles Taylor writes, "The entire
modern development of the affirmation of ordinary life was, I
believe, foreshadowed and initiated, in all its facets, in the
spirituality of the Reformation." Sources of the Self: The Making
of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1989), 218.

13 "The Church in Society: A Lutheran Perspective," an
ELCA social statement adopted in 1991, 3.

14 The ELCA has encouraged congregations to be
"communities of moral deliberation." See the social statement, "The
Church in Society," 5-6, 7-8.

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